Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC appointed as an Adjunct Full Professor
Doughty Street Chambers is delighted to announce that Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC has been appointed as an Adjunct Full Professor in University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland, assigned to the UCD Sutherland School of Law. The appointment takes effect from 1st September 2023.
Caoilfhionn is a human rights lawyer and barrister, specialising in human rights law, public law, media law, inquests/ inquiries, community care and prison law. Since 2005, Caoilfhionn has acted in many landmark human rights cases before the European Court of Human Rights, United Nations bodies and other international tribunals, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and courts in the UK and a number of other jurisdictions.
Her work includes acting for bereaved families and survivors of the 7/7 London Bombings and the Hillsborough disaster; for media organisations in the Gareth Williams and Alexander Litvinenko inquests; in a series of test cases which have changed the law on the treatment of children in police custody; and in test cases concerning the adverse impact of benefit cuts upon single mothers, disabled children, carers and survivors of domestic violence. Many of her cases are extremely sensitive and concern issues of national security. She has acted for a number of individuals whose lives are at risk from vigilantes or other groups, where difficult Article 2 ECHR issues arise concerning police protection; and she has also acted for many victims and survivors of child sexual abuse, sexual exploitation and trafficking.
Caoilfhionn is a leading international expert in journalists’ safety, arbitrary detention of journalists and accountability for journalists’ deaths. She leads the international legal teams in a range of high profile, sensitive cases, including acting for the family of Daphne Caruana Galizia, assassinated in Malta in 2017; Jimmy Lai, the media owner, writer and pro-democracy campaigner imprisoned in Hong Kong; over 150 BBC Persian journalists, targeted by Iran for their work; and (co-leading with Amal Clooney) the case of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa in the Philippines. In 2019 Caoilfhionn was appointed an expert in safety of journalists and gender-based violence by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and gave expert evidence to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in the landmark case of Jineth Bedoya Lima v. Colombia.
Caoilfhionn also has extensive expertise in the fields of children’s rights and gender-based violence. She has acted in many of the leading cases in the UK and internationally, some of which are cutting-edge cases that have defined the law in these areas. She has given evidence on human rights issues to Parliamentary committees in a number of jurisdictions, including the UK, Australia, the Council of Europe and the European Parliament.
In February 2023 Caoilfhionn was appointed Ireland’s Special Rapporteur on Child Protection. In 2017 she was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), 2017, for her “outstanding contribution to the protection of human rights” for founding the Act for the Act campaign, a mass advertising campaign to tell positive stories about the Human Rights Act on buses, in tube stations and on advertising hoardings across Scotland, England and Wales. Caoilfhionn was educated at UCD and the Honorable Society of the King’s Inns in Dublin, and Cambridge University. She will continue her practice alongside her commitments at UCD.
